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IT Management

How to Analyze Non-Discretionary IT Budgets

October 28, 2010
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Print PDF Guest post by Kevin Caceres and Sean Sell When faced with cost pressures, our reaction is often to delay or scale-back projects or cut discretionary projects altogether.  To make matters worse, critical projects are not funded while the non-discretionary IT budget – often two to four times as much as the discretionary budget – continues to grow untouched. We’d like to share some thoughts on how to better understand and attack waste in ...

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Tackling Total Cost of Ownership

October 13, 2010
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Print PDF Guest post by Sean Sell Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis is intended to determine the lifetime costs of acquiring, operating, and changing something. It is primarily used to make apples to apples comparisons in large capital investments, and, if done properly, can bring out hidden costs of ownership. The term is regaining popularity largely because of the questions about cloud computing. TCO to Support Vendor Claims Although the concept has been around ...

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13 More IT Cost Cutting Ideas

July 27, 2010
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It’s always interesting to me which blog topics generate interest. Two weeks ago, I asked the #CIO Twitter community to offer their ideas for IT cost cutting and the summary was one of the more active posts lately, especially on LinkedIn groups like the Forbes CIO Network. I have summarized the comments below. Thanks to Robert Marchant, Jerry Rosenbaum, Puneet Dhawan, Reuben Thomas, Krishna Pulipati, Curtis Todd and Roger Jennings for their thoughtful comments…...

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Did BP See All of Its Problems In Time?

June 16, 2010
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Print PDF In their letter to BP’s CEO Tony Hayward, the Committee on Energy and Commerce chairmen outline 5 major issues they believe caused the current disaster.  In a nutshell, they are: They chose a cheaper way to line the well pipes despite multiple warnings (design) They installed only 6 of the recommended 21 devices to center the casing in the well because they were pressed for time (design) They skipped a test to see ...

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Does the CIO Control IT Spending?

January 29, 2010
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Print PDF At Diamond, we are in the early stages of analyzing survey data from our 2010 Diamond Digital IQ study, a multi-industry study of the strategic use of IT.  The respondents are equally distributed between business and IT leaders. For more details on what to expect, have a look at the DDIQ results from the last two years and a summary published by CIO Insight. To whet your appetites, I wanted to share one ...

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Run IT Like a Business, Not As a Business

January 25, 2010
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Print PDF A recent InfoWorld article by Bob Lewis questions the IT organization concept of “running IT as a business.”  Paraphrasing, he poses several problems with it: No one inside your company is your customer IT’s costs are always higher than external options Building software that “meets customer requirements” is short-sighted and reactive Software product focus limits enterprise wide thinking and shared investment It creates more organizational and relationship barriers and is seen as a ...

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A Resurgence of Portfolio Management?

January 21, 2010
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Print PDF by Chris Curran and Jim Quick Portfolio management was all the rage 5-6 years ago, driven in part by some good management thinking from people like Peter Weill at MIT CISR and Dr. Howard Rubin and in part by some software tool vendors.  Back then, most organizations added some kind of portfolio thinking or at least dabbled with it.  While most of the interest seemed to be in the IT organization, some organizations ...

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6 Ways to Find Weak Signals

October 9, 2009
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Print PDF One of the fundamental mysteries in the practice of IT management is “why cant we get better at delivering projects?”  Much has been written about the subject, with the balance focusing on the negative – project failure, IT Fail, etc.  A recent article in MIT Sloan Management Review got me thinking about another angle on this question – maybe we are ignoring some fundamental, but less obvious signs that our projects are not ...

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Using Weak Signals to Detect Troubled Projects

October 2, 2009
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Print PDF Every little bit helps in sniffing out projects that are destined for trouble.  You would think that with 10+ years of project success data from Standish and others, we would have collectively improved things significantly.  This is not the case. So, I read with interest Paul Shoemaker and George Day’s article in the Spring 2009 MIT Sloan Management Review called How to Make Sense of Weak Signals with an eye toward applying these ...

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The Problem with Pay-Per-Service in Healthcare and IT

September 18, 2009
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Print PDF I caught part of a Charlie Rose interview with Jay Rockefeller this morning (episode not online yet) and heard the senator say that pay-per-service healthcare is a bad idea.  Being deeply immersed in the cloud computing discussion that hangs its hat on a similar payment model, I paid more attention than I might normally.  He said it’s bad because it encourages providers to add more services to make more money – regardless of ...

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